“Well!” resumed the old lady, more lightly, “then, for three days in the week I had a dancing-master come to teach me; and twice in the week a music-master; and all manner of new gowns, and my hair dressed in a multitude of curls; and my mother’s maid to teach me French, and see that I carried myself well. And when this had gone on a while, my mother began to carry me a-visiting when she went to see her friends. For above a year she used a hackney coach; but then my father was made Doctor, and had a great church given him that was then all the mode; and my Lady Jennings came up to Town, and finding he had parts, she began to take note of him, and would carry him in her coach to the Court; and my mother would then set up her own coach, the which she did. And at length, the summer before I was one-and-twenty, my Lady Jennings, without the privity of my father, offered my mother to have me a maid to one of the Ladies in Waiting on the Queen. From this place, said she, if I played my cards well, and was liked of them above me, I might come in time to be a Maid of Honour.”
“O rare!” exclaimed Rhoda. “And did you, Mrs Dolly?”
“Yes, child,” slowly answered Mrs Dorothy. “I did so.”
Rhoda’s face was sparkling with interest and pleasure. Phoebe’s was shadowed with forebodings, of a sad end to come.
“The night ere I left home for the Court,” pursued the old lady, “my mother held long converse with me. ‘Thou art mightily improved, Dolly,’ saith she, ‘since thy coming to London; but there is yet a stiff soberness about thee, that thou wilt do well to be rid of. Thou shouldst have more ease, child. Do but look at thy cousin Jenny, that is three years younger than thou, and yet how will she rattle to every man that hath a word of compliment to pay her!’ But after she had made an end, my father called me into his closet. ‘Poor Dorothy!’ he said. ‘The bloom is not all off the peach yet. But ’tis going, child—’tis fast going. I feared this. Poor Dorothy!’”
“Oh, dear!” said Rhoda. “You were not going to a funeral, Mrs Dolly!”
“Ah, child! maybe, if I had, it had been the better for me. The wise man saith, ‘It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting.’”
“But pray, what harm came to you, Mrs Dorothy?”
“No outward bodily harm at all, my dear. Yet even that was no thanks to me. It was ‘of the Lord’s compassion,’ seeing He had a purpose of mercy toward me. But, ah me! what inward and spiritual harm! Mrs Rhoda, my dear, I saw sights and heard sayings those two years I dwelt in the Court which I would give the world, so to speak, only to forget them now.”
“What were they, Mrs Dorothy?” asked Rhoda, eagerly sitting up.